Fortune » Mary Civiello - Fortunehttp://fortune.com
Fortune 500 Daily & Breaking Business NewsSun, 02 Aug 2015 22:26:48 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/dab01945b542bffb69b4f700d7a35f8f?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.png » Mary Civiello - Fortunehttp://fortune.com
Fortunehttps://s0.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/fortune/assets/images/fortunelogo.pnghttp://fortune.com25040Why you should be more friendly at workhttp://fortune.com/2015/01/18/why-you-should-be-more-friendly-at-work/
http://fortune.com/2015/01/18/why-you-should-be-more-friendly-at-work/#commentsSun, 18 Jan 2015 16:00:15 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=947448]]>MPW Insider is one of several online communities where the biggest names in business answer timely career and leadership questions. Today's answer for: What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time? is written by Mary Civiello, President of Civiello Communications Group.

When taking on a new leadership role, I urge women to make likability a priority right out of the gate. Ever since Nicolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince, 500 years ago, experts have recognized that strength and likability/warmth are the two most important qualities in leadership. According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, these qualities account for more than 90% of first impressions. However, Machiavelli said it’s hard to be both likable and strong, so he thought aiming for strength was safer.

Today, most new leaders concentrate on showing strength and competence, but unless someone is waiting around the corner with a sword drawn, a growing body of evidence suggests newly minted leaders should actually be focusing on likability first. While strength makes people feel they have to follow you, warmth makes employees WANT to follow you. Furthermore, the researchers found that warmth lays the foundation for trust, making it more likely employees will listen and remember what you say.

So how do you warm up? Focus on what you say and how you say it; show that you understand and care about others; and be authentic.

Here are my three best tips to display warmth:

SmileIt’s the easiest thing you can do to connect to people, yet the most common challenge I see in coaching executives. No matter how serious the message, you can always benefit from showing those pearly whites. You will smile naturally if you smile with your EYES as well as your mouth…think crow’s feet. Another way to ensure authenticity is connecting to your own feelings. Ask yourself, "are you really happy to be here? Pleased to see so many faces?" Finally, you can often give yourself something to smile about by telling a story.

Share storiesTell stories that illustrate your values and who you are as an individual. They should be about your victories AND your struggles. As a coach, I have seen men and women forgo personal anecdotes in favor of data and hard facts in their presentations. Mainly because new leaders often fear that including personal experiences make them look inferior and unqualified when in fact, they add credibility to your message. If you really want people to take chances and innovate, you need to tell them about a time when you took a risk and share how scary it was. It's comforting to your audience to hear that you too have failed and still came out ahead.

Forget the scriptReading from a script makes you sound disconnected from your audience and, more importantly, you lose authenticity. For example, if you merely read last year's performance review word-for-word without incorporating any personal reflection your employees will not get a real sense of how you actually feel. So if you're someone who feels safer with a script, just be sure to include some tidbits of your own opinion, because there is no greater risk to your leadership than appearing inauthentic.

So the bottom line for leaders: Yes, demonstrate your competence but first, warm it up to win!

Read all answers to the MPW Insider question: What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?

CEOs, celebrities and politicians are all putting finishing touches on commencement addresses for colleges across the country. But if the run up to graduation day is any indication, speakers may have more to worry about than stumbling on their words. Protestors have caused the cancellation of speakers from Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor to Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF.

And if critics don’t succeed in getting a speech scrubbed they may protest in real time.

Indeed, while the majority of any kind of speech goes off smoothly, where there is a stage there is always the possibility of interruptions, even hecklers, trying to grab the spotlight. As a coach, here’s what I tell my clients to do if unscheduled speakers become a distraction:

Pause and identify the problem. There is a big difference between people with tough questions and hecklers. Questioners want answers, and hecklers are just hell-bent on being heard. With the interrupting questioner you can take a stab at answering mid speech and then suggest a conversation off-line. With the heckler you need a different strategy:

Power up! You have the mic so jump in and ask, “Do you have a question?” Often a heckler will back off, but if he has a question, hear him out–that’s what he wants. And depending of what he says and how he says it you may thank him for his thoughts. This usually works, but if not…

Enlist help. In some cases there may be security, but in every case you have your audience, and that’s a big advantage. Turn to them, and ask if they’d like to hear more from the heckler. Ask if they’d like to hear from you. In the case of a commencement address, ask the audience if they’d like to focus again on honoring the college graduates. You just know that some mom or dad will stand up and tell the heckler to take a hike.

Freedom of speech is something we all cherish. So is fairness.

I hope heckling doesn’t happen to you. But if it does you’ll be ready and if you handle a heckler well, you’ll look even more like a leader.

Mary Civiello is an executive communications coach who works with leaders at some of the world’s largest businesses and not-for-profit organizations, as well as high-profile startups. She is also author of Communication Counts: Business Presentations for Busy People. Previously, she was a reporter and anchor at NBC in New York.

In a new book The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance - What Women Should Know, two high-profile TV journalists, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, say women are less confident than men even when they are equally competent. They cite studies that suggest this lack of confidence is getting in the way of more women getting ahead. The authors have seen it in themselves and in interviews with powerful people.

As a communications coach for the last decade, I’m not surprised. I’ve not only seen it, but I've asked women why to help find solutions.

In the last year it seems every other week there is an article or study or survey about executive presence as a challenge for women. Executive presence - looking and sounding like a leader - is often a euphemism for confidence. Businesses don’t approach me to help an executive because he or she lacks confidence, but because they need to “polish their presence.” Nobody wants to acknowledge that their leader lacks confidence. Indeed, most often I’ve found they are confident in the job they do - they just don’t look it or feel deep down that they deserve success.

In my decade of coaching top executives, this is far more often the case with women.

For instance, I once worked with a well-educated executive who was dealing with her fear of speaking. When I pressed her about what exactly she was afraid of, she said she feared people would think she is not smart enough. This irrational fear was making her stiff, formal and unemotional when she needed to emote to promote her organization’s good work around the world.

And within the last year training high-potential women at several financial services firms, leaders identified two main communication challenges: First, they said women don’t ask for reviews as often as men, and men were afraid of offering feedback for fear of women getting emotional or defensive. Secondly, they said women don’t sit up front and participate like men. The communication challenges were holding women back. In the session, I asked the crowd for reaction. One young woman said it’s hard to squeeze in or speak up in a man's club. Another said she doesn’t participate because she’s afraid they’ll dismiss her and her ideas if she didn’t have all the answers.

So how can women start feeling more confident?

I suggest clients look at a FedEx FDX ad - the one where two guys say the same thing at a conference table but the second guy is confident. The first, more junior guy floats his idea as a question, his voice goes up at the end of the statement (young girls listen up. that’s UP speak) As he speaks, his eyes dart around the table, he’s crunched over leaning on his elbows and he looks disheveled. The second man sits up, slightly forward. His voice goes down at the end of his thought with conviction. He looks distinctly at a few people at the table vs. scanning. The only script difference is that he leads off with a line “OK how bout this..”. Then he pauses, and that reels in attention.

Easy enough, but here’s how women can do better:

It’s the way we look and look

In a decade of coaching I can count on one hand the number of men who have been bothered by the way they look on camera and let me assure you it’s not because they all look so good. Women on the other hand cannot focus on the coaching if they feel they don’t look their best. This is all understandable. It’s one of the reasons I don’t miss being on TV at the crack of dawn. Visually, we have more clothing and hair choices than men and we have long been judged on our looks no matter what the job and how well you do. Ask Hilary Clinton.

Then there’s the way we look, the way we see. Women tend to take in more than men. In The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, Sally Helgesen and Julie Johnson note that women possess “broad spectrum notice.” We notice the emotional reactions to an idea around the conference table, allowing us to gauge support. But that also means women are more likely to get thrown off by the one person who isn’t buying what they’re selling vs. a man who doesn’t see or care what that guy thinks. Women are pleasers and multi-taskers. This can be a disadvantage when it comes to confidence.

The prescription in both of these cases is training yourself to freeze out your frown lines as well as the guy who is frowning and focus on positive people as well as your purpose. In a study featured in Harvard Business Review, researchers found that executive presence can only be improved if women focused not just on their style but also on their purpose - their reason for communicating.

Speak up but avoid up speak and squeak

Women have a larger vocal range and when nervous tend to get high pitched. Studies show people think lower voice tones sound more confident. After all, men have been the model for leaders for years. The fix here is recording yourself and practice using the lower range of what is normal for you. It worked for former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and can work for you too!

Don’t hold back too long or serve up too much

Women tend to hold back at the table. Like the woman at my financial services seminar, they fear they don’t have all the facts. Recently I worked with a C-suite woman new to a business. she admitted she hadn’t spoken up at executive meetings because she wanted to wait until she had more information. It had been two months. I suggested that she was being too cautious, too modest. She had years of related experience in another large organization. Remind them, I said, and chime in. She did.

Then, once women open up, they can be too wordy with too many qualifiers. “I think. I know there are a lot of people who have opinions more valuable than mine.” Get out in the traffic and take the credit. Or in the conclusion of the Confidence Code: take more risks and care less about pleasing and perfection

But before women get too down about an uphill battle, I suggest we think again about the aforementioned challenges:

Now, all of these tendencies can also be huge positives in short supply in corporate America. In The Female Vision, authors say more performance evaluations need to embrace and reward these traditional female strengths. So the bottom line, there are two factors to solve the crisis in confidence: Women need to lean in, and businesses need to look into revising performance criteria that values qualities naturally possessed by half the world - qualities the world needs now.

Mary Civiello is an executive communications coach who works with leaders at some of the world's largest businesses and not-for-profit organizations, as well as high-profile startups. She is also author of Communication Counts: Business Presentations for Busy People. Previously, she was a reporter and anchor at NBC in New York.